SPRINGFIELD, Ore. — Oregon’s summer and fall harvests are worth waiting for; but by learning a few tricks, eating local can be an all year occurrence.

The kitchen at Sprout! is up and running after years of planning.

“Things are going great. We have our first users in the space, Mcgean’s Cookies. They’re making gourmet cookies and selling them at our farmer’s market as well. We have a number of other users on the docket,” said Micah Elconin, Sprout! Program Supervisor.

The commercial kitchen’s stocked with gear.

“Every piece of kitchen equipment you could really ever want,” Elconin said.

This makes it the perfect place for a kind of fermentation demonstration.

“Sauerkraut is a great example of a fermented food. It’s something that appeals to just about everybody, young and old,” said Jennifer Levin, Master Food Preserver.

Levin is a University of Oregon professor by day, but also a master food preserver with the OSU extension service.

“You need the cabbage and you need the salt. That’s it. You need to slice the cabbage as finely as you can. What you do is you get the salt and kind of break up the cabbage shreds so you get the liquid exuding. What you’re doing is you’re breaking down the cells here. Once you do that, then you wanna pack it really firmly into your jar. The salt starts to act on the cabbage and break it down. Then the lactic bacteria starts to form in the cabbage and make it sour. That’s it. It’s really easy,” Levin said.

Most other recipes aren’t that easy, which is why it helps to get some hands-on training through one of the extension service’s classes.

“They are absolutely the best bargain in town. For a price of about $40 or $50, you get instruction, recipes, hands-on training, samples, lunch. You get all kinds of benefits from a very cheap class,” Levin said.

Not to mention taking advantage of the Willamette Valley’s bountiful harvest.

“What’s nice about preservation is if you learn things like how to make sauerkraut or make fermented salsa or make fermented peppers, you can actually eat locally all year round,” Levin said.

Click here for a list of extension service classes.

EUGENE, Ore. — One of the advantages of living along the Pacific Ocean is the bountiful supply of fresh seafood.

But hauling all that fish and crab from the coast to Eugene can eat up a lot of gas.

One local fish market is making its commute green.

“The store’s been here for 30-some years,” said Ryan Rogers, Fisherman’s Market Owner.

Sitting on the corner of 7th Avenue and Blair Boulevard, Fisherman’s Market probably catches your eye from time to time. Maybe it’s the steam rising from the crab cookers out front.

“It’s just kind of unique to Eugene. We have a little bit of everything here,” Rogers said.

Or the sign detailing the fresh product that’s just come in from the boats in Newport.

“We buy all of our crab, salmon, halibut, black cod. They catch a lot of different species for us,” Rogers said.

Other fish, like the Chinook salmon, come from the Columbia River.

“Our truck drives all over the state all year long,” Rogers said.

Rogers’ Ford isn’t the gas guzzler it looks like.

“We’ve been running almost six years on vegetable oil,” Rogers said.

The oil that’s used to fry up the market’s fish and chips gets saved, filtered, then poured into the tank.

“It’s very clean burning. So not only are we getting rid of it in a good way, but the emissions are about 15 percent compared to when it’s running on diesel,” Rogers said.

The truck uses both kinds of fuel, since the oil needs to heat up before it’s the right consistency.

“At 180 degrees, vegetable oil acts just like diesel in a diesel engine,” Rogers said. “As soon as we get on the road, say we’re going to Newport, by the time we get to Junction City, we flip it over and drive the whole rest of the way on vegetable oil.”

Those trips to Newport, Portland and all over the rest of the state eat up a lot of oil.

1:18 ryan we use about 80 to 100 gallons a month, especially if i’m driving a lot,” Rogers said. “We don’t generate enough oil ourselves, so we work with Newman’s on a lot of things. So I haul a lot of product for them in exchange for all their vegetable oil. It works out great for both of us.”

It’s great for the businesses and for the environment.

“So it’s a feel-good feeling all the way around,” Rogers said.

EUGENE, Ore. – A majority of people have a bottle of ketchup in the fridge, and chances are it’s the plain tomato variety. One local startup didn’t want to settle for the old standard and decided to mix things up.

“We were sitting at Rennie’s talking about a school project and having tots and dipping them in ketchup, and we kind of realized ketchup was just boring,” said Shannon Oliver, Red Duck Ketchup Co-founder.

That’s when the four University of Oregon graduate students had an idea to spice up the flavors.

“We spent many hours in Karen’s kitchen, making more than 20 different flavor profiles. We did some Asian spices. We did Indian spices. The three we came up with were the ones that, across the board, people just really, really liked the most,” Oliver said.

There are the classic flavors, spicy flavors and even a curry flavored one.

The ingredients are simple and clean.

“Everything except for the vinegar is organic. We use organic tomato paste, organic spices, most of which come from Mountain Rose Herbs, sea salt,” Oliver said.

Red Duck Ketchup just launched a Kickstarter account. You can find out more information about the company and its products here.

JUNCTION CITY, Ore. — Tomatoes, berries, squash–they’re part of the delicious seasons that are summer and fall here in Oregon.

Though it will be a few months before people get to taste them, local farms are already preparing for the harvest.

“Right now, we’re starting all the seedlings for the season. We have onions, broccoli, kale, chard, lettuce and all the early season stuff,” said Jonah Bloch, Camas Swale Farm Owner.

These are the first steps of preparation for the bountiful spring and summer to come at Camas Swale Farm.

“As the season progresses, we grow tomatoes, potatoes, peppers, eggplants, carrots, beets. Pretty much everything the season allows us to,” Bloch said.

As the seedlings sprout in one greenhouse, another on the farm property is bursting with life. Bloch harvests spinach, lettuce and kale several times a week for the farm’s 50-member Community Supported Agriculture program.

“We really focus on the CSA. I’d say more than half of what we grow goes to our CSA,” Bloch said.

“About 20 to 25 percent of our business is based on CSAs,” said John Deck, Deck Family Farm Owner.

Deck Family Farm provides CSAs full of meat, pig, chicken, sheep and cow.

“It allows us to be more efficient. It makes it so we can deliver product more directly to consumers,” Deck said.

That direct connection benefits both sides of the transaction. CSA members get better bang for their buck, and the farms take home more profit.

“That allows us to invest in the season, and most CSAs end up being pretty generous as the season really shows its abundance,” Bloch said.

To share that abundance, though, the farms need people to subscribe to their CSAs. The idea is members buy in this time of year, giving farmers the capital to get their crops started.

“You will be giving them money at the beginning of the season, then you reap the harvest along with them,” said Katharine Hunt, That’s My Farmer Organizer.

Every farm offers something different, maybe one has a focus on fruits and another on meat, you can shop around every spring at That’s My Farmer.

“The first year we went to That’s My Farmer, we met families and those families are our customers today. So we have developed some really great long-term, lasting relationships,” Deck said.

It’s a partnership between local farms and the Eugene faith community. This year, 14 local CSA providers will team up with 14 local churches.

“Community Supported Agriculture offers an easy way for organizations like churches to connect with farms,” said John Pitney, First United Methodist Pastor.

Pitney launched the event 14 years ago. He says the collaboration just makes sense.

“Pretty much all of us have in our faith story, something about being created from the dirt, coming from there and returning to there,” Pitney said.

That dirt is providing life in a religious sense and in a literal sense. It helps these plants grow, these farms thrive, and this community sustain itself.

“Support local farming, support local foods, support local entrepreneurs,” Bloch said.

You can check out That’s My Farmer on April 16 at the First United Methodist Church, located at 13th Avenue and Olive Street in Eugene. Click here for more information.

EUGENE, Ore. — Over the past decade, one local business has grown from five employees working out of a Pleasant Hill home to about 130 in a huge west Eugene production facility. As it grew, it maintained its goal of zero waste.

Walk into Mountain Rose Herbs‘ west Eugene production facility and it’s a sensory overload. The sounds, smells, tastes and sights are a lot to take in.

The first sound you hear ironically comes from the last step in production: shipping.

“We ship all over the country. We sell to Canada and the United States,” said Erin McIntosh, Communications Manager.

Workers pack the boxes with Mountain Rose oils, rubs and teas. The boxes might not be the same shade as this packing material, but it turns out they’re just as green–made from post-consumer waste cardboard.

“Sustainability guides everything that we do here,” McIntosh said.

The clearest example of that is the ingredients Mountain Rose uses in its products–the source of the smell that permeates the building and sticks to your clothes.

“It’s really hard to pinpoint because we sell so many different herbs, oils, spices and teas. It’s just a nice combination of it all,” said Julie DeBord, Production Manager.

“It penetrates everything. The aromas of the spices–the peppercorns, the roses, the mints–they’re so aromatic, and they just sort of cling to you,” McIntosh said.

Not just aromatic, the spices are all organic, in most cases ethically wild harvested.

“We know for a fact there are no chemical pesticides, no synthetic fertilizers being used. They’re all grown as the earth intended,” McIntosh said.

“Flavor and the vibrancy, the color, the smell–everything about it is better when it’s organic,” DeBord said.

In the most basic terms, DeBord is in charge of how its teas and rubs taste.

“Flavor has a lot to do with it, but we’re working a lot with medicinal herbs. So every tea has its primary ingredients and secondary ingredients and a specific action we’re going for,” DeBord said.

Those ingredients get poured into a machine and, in one case, mixed to make a pickling spice. Just looking at the finished product is breathtaking: a beautiful mixture of mustard seed, dill seed and black peppercorns. Combinations like this get scooped into environmentally-friendly bags made of tree cellulose and boxes created using 100 percent recycled newspapers.

“We’re able to make this packaging out of waste materials that would otherwise have just ended up in landfills,” McIntosh said.

It’s just another example of Mountain Rose’s dedication to sustainability and maintaining its zero-waste facility. So not only will these products make you feel good, you can feel good about using them too.

Though Mountain Rose does ship all over the country, you can order and pick up the products at its west Eugene facility.

SPRINGFIELD, Ore. — Lane County is one of the few communities that can boast a food hub, a center based entirely on supporting the local food industry. But how does its food hub work?

“People talk about the Willamette Valley like it’s the garden of Eden. This is an amazing agriculture area that has more or less limitless potential to grow its own food,” said Micah Elconin, SPROUT! Program Supervisor.

The ground will grow it, but managers at the Neighborhood Economic Development Corporation, or NEDCO, knew to get people to buy that food, eat it and, cook it, they’d need to make that abundant harvest more accessible.

“We started the Springfield Farmer’s Market five years ago,” Elconin said.

What began as a few booths in downtown bloomed into the year-round Market@SRPOUT! in what used to be First Christian Church.

“We saw the opportunity to not only revitalize a great historic building in downtown Springfield, but to revitalize it in such a way that it could become this resource, which is now a full-service food hub,” Elconin said.

Every Friday, local vendors fill the former sanctuary with the goods they hauled in from their farms–everything from hazelnuts to squash to turnips.

But while one part of the church buzzed with activity, another part sat unused until now.

“This is a fully licensed shared-use production space,” Elconin said.

The appliances are many. The burners brand new. It is a cook’s dream, and that’s the point.

“Kitchen@SPROUT! is a shared use production kitchen for new and growing food businesses,” Elconin said.

The dry sinks, empty mixers and barren freezer will soon come to life.

“We are just this week even finishing up some final program elements and will be getting full guidelines and applications to the many interested users we already have,” Elconin said. “I’ve been contacted by nearly 30 different businesses with strong interest in being in this space.”

They’re businesses like food carts that need a place to prep, or new food product companies that need a space for production, maybe even a culinary pro who wants to share his skills in a cooking class.

“We’re just really excited about getting people in the space,” Elconin said.

Users who rent time there can take a quick jaunt up the stairs and rent an office directly above the kitchen through Hatch@SPROUT, the organization’s business incubator. They’ll get guidance and mentoring from SPROUT’s managers, along with partnership opportunities with other users set up here.

The programs–the market, kitchen and offices–are a way to nurture new businesses, foster creativity, and take advantage of that Eden-like agriculture we, at times, take for granted.

“Best case scenario for me is that I have lots of people come in and use the space, then grow so successfully that they outgrow the space,” Elconin said.

Anyone interested in renting some time in the Kitchen@SPROUT can click here for more information.

EUGENE, Ore. — It’s a challenge every farmer faces–how to keep livestock safe from predators. A West Eugene farm took a “Eugene” approach that the owner hopes others will consider.

“We have seen skunks, raccoons, foxes, coyotes, cougars, hawks and owls,” said Sharon Blick, owner of Living Earth Farm.

Those are just the predators the farm has seen, but who knows what else is lurking in the woods that surround the chicken coops.

“Our main product is the eggs, but we do butcher the hens after laid for over a year. Then we butcher them and sell them as stewing hens,” Blick said.

This make the nearly 300 hens a serious investment and the farm’s main income.

“Right now, we’re getting about five dozen eggs a day, but when they were at their peak, we were getting more than I could fit in my backpack. We were getting probably about 12 dozen eggs a day,” Blick said.

Protecting their investment is a top priority, but so is maintaining the wildlife around the farm; Blick jumped through hoops to make sure Living Earth was certified predator-friendly.

“Predator-friendly certification means your farm is not killing predators, not calling in government trappers to kill predators and taking measures to protect your livestock without using lethal means on the predators,” Blick said.

Instead, the farm uses deterrents like an electric fence.

“This pretty much stops all the ground predators. We’ve never lost a chicken to a ground predator,” Blick said.

But for predators that come from the air, such as hawks and owls, a dog seems to do a good job keeping those predators away, whether he’s real or not.

“That’s our main defense against the hawks is having the guard dogs,” Blick said. “We have their house that we close at night when they’re roosting at night. If we forget to close it, we have had owls actually go in through the little door and get a chicken.”

The chickens aren’t the only ones that go inside once it gets dark.

“For the goats, we have a guard llama,” Blick said.

The whole group of goats moves into the barn at night. It’s a lot of work shuttling animals in and out and moving decoys to keep predators at bay, but the farm’s owners say it’s worth it.

“To create a wildlife-friendly farm. It’s more fun for us to and for the animals too,” Blick said.

To find out more about predator-friendly farms and what it takes to get certified, click here.

They’re separated by dozens of miles, but Sweet Home Farms and the Deck Family Farm are united in their mission to providing natural, hormone-free meat.

“This was not a mistake–the way they decided to raise all these different animals,” said Daniel O’Malley, Sweet Home Farms Manager.

O’Malley’s parents started farming just more than six years ago.

“They were health researchers at Kaiser Permanente in Portland, and they were driving home one day from somewhere out in the country, and Carla decided this was something her and her husband Mike, my father, could go ahead and do,” O’Malley said.

So they did, but not before putting that background in health research to use, figuring out how to raise their goats, chickens and sheep.

“We know it doesn’t have antibiotics. We know we’re not using hormones, and we’re letting the animals get to express their natural instincts,” O’Malley said.

“We do grass-fed and finished organic meats. We do beef, lamb, pork, chicken; all animals that can be grazed on pasture,” said Christine Deck, Deck Family Farm Owner.

Deck offers a tour for those wanting to walk around the dozens of acres that house all the animals.

“The farm has an open-gate policy. We’re open any day except Sunday for people just to come by, and people come by a lot. That’s awesome because we get to share this beauty and what we do with the community,” Deck said.

The farms also share with the community in the form of shares.

“CSAs are really at the heart of what we do because that’s when we can really involve families and get people out to the farm,” Deck said.

It’s essentially a share of the harvest, which is different for each farm.

“We bring in a beef, a lamb, a pork and 32 chickens,” Deck said.

“A third in ground meats, a third in roasts and a third in steaks with the about difference being made up with occasionally bones and organ meats,” O’Malley said.

O’Malley puts together shares for about 50 customers each month.

“We’d like to have 75 to 100,” O’Malley said.

“If we could sell everything directly to the customer, we would,” Deck said.

Because the more directly goods get to customers, the more directly money comes back to the farm.

“It’s a lot of work, and the margins are thin,” Deck said.

Those thin margins are augmented only by community support.

“It’s really a bond. This way of farming can’t exist if people don’t believe in it,” Deck said.

You can check for a full list of year-round CSAs here.

CRESWELL, Ore. — Winter in western Oregon. It’s not exactly the time people think of as being bountiful for local crops; but in the past few years, the number of farms producing in the colder months has grown.

“I think people are usually amazed to see a greenhouse like this in February,” Erica Trappe, Sweetwater Farm Co-Owner said. “Lots of hearty greens and root vegetables.”

Gloomy fog lingers in the hills around Sweetwater Farm and a few weeks in January the temperature didn’t get out of the low 30s.

“The greens just keep growing with just this little protection from the greenhouse,” Trappe said.

Sweetwater Farm produces crops even when most local farms give their fields a rest. The yield, though, is different this time of year.

“A lot of kale, collards, some Asian greens, radishes, beets, turnips,” Trappe said.

All the farm’s crops are harvested and shared in a community supported agriculture boxes, or CSA’s.

“We’re doing about 100 shares a week. It varies a little bit; one of the features of our CSA is people can skip weeks whenever they need to, so it’s always a little different from week to week,” Trappe said.

Families subscribe to the Shares from the Farm program. Then every week the crew at Sweetwater loads up boxes of its goods and delivers them to drop-off locations in town. It’s a way to connect people who live in the city with fresh, organic, locally grown produce.

“We’re basically providing food for 90 to 100 families each week,” Trappe said.

But Trappe says the farm could do more, thanks to a tight-knit farming community.

“Part of the key to doing a year-round CSA is having partnerships with other local farms. In order to keep a good variety in the shares, we’re getting stuff in from Sweet Leaf Farm. We buy from SLO Farm, Open Oak, Diamond Hill and Organically Grown Company,” Trappe said.

The other partnership is with the customers, the ones who know the value of eating local.

“I think the awareness has definitely grown,” Trappe said.

Customers protect the farms like the greenhouses protect the crops, ensuring they stay alive and healthy through difficult conditions.

If you’re interested in subscribing to Sweetwater Farm’s CSA, click here.

EUGENE, Ore. — On the day before Valentine’s Day, a lot of people are scrambling to get something for their special someone. Chocolate is always a popular choice, but how about some that’s local and handmade from the Euphoria Chocolate Company?

“Valentine’s Day and the day before Valentine’s Day are our two busiest days of the year and we’re just running nonstop,” said Bob Bury, Euphoria’s owner.

His crew is dipping nonstop, packaging nonstop and selling nonstop. Just think about how many Oreos went into the pot of chocolate or how many truffles got extra chocolate tap, tap, tapped off. The staff there’s been through it all before, though.

“We have about 30 people on our payroll and a lot of them have been for years and years and years. We value that a lot,” Bury said.

Not only does Euphoria create local jobs, it uses local ingredients.

“You can’t buy cocoa beans locally, obviously, but all of our dairy products come from Lockmead Dairy in Junction City. All of our hazelnuts, or filberts, are from Oregon,” Bury said.

Some of Euphoria’s truffles are also made with Oregon wines, and Euphoria’s newest addition, dark chocolate granolas, are local too.

“We just try to do as much as we possibly can locally because it’s just a good thing to do,” Bury said.

So you can feel good about stopping by to buy any of their sweets for your sweetheart, knowing by buying from any of Euphoria’s three locations, your money creates jobs and spreads far beyond the chocolate factory in West Eugene.